Is Dame Judi Dench really the best ever actor?

Bill Kenwright, the producer, says that Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud are
also contenders for the accolade

Dame Judi Dench Photo: CHRISTOPHER PLEDGER

By Tim Walker

6:28AM GMT 17 Dec 2010

It’s a tough time of year for some publications to fill their pages. Even so, Mandrake wonders if The Stage didn’t do its reputation more harm than good among members of the acting profession with its survey which purported to show that Dame Judi Dench, is “the greatest theatre actor of all time”.

The producer Bill Kenwright, who wrote a piece in the weekly championing Dame Judi, accepted actors such as Olivier and Gielgud also had legitimate claims to the crown.

The Stage claims in its latest issue “nearly 900 votes were cast”. Yesterday it conceded only 748 of these were “validated”.

Hugh Bonneville's feet are still on the ground

Success would not appear to have gone to the head of Hugh Bonneville. The engaging Downton Abbey star says viewers still can’t quite place him.

“People still believe that I’m someone they met at a wedding,” he admits. “And when you are in anything successful, people in the business assume you are frantically busy. But it’s not true. My agent hasn’t been fending off an avalanche of scripts, I’m afraid.”

Filming of the second series of Downton Abbey is due to start in February, but Bonneville says it will be up to the writer Julian Fellowes whether his character, Robert, Earl of Grantham, survives.

Rattigan rabbits

The centenary of the birth of Sir Terence Rattigan will be marked next year with a number of starry stage revivals of his plays. Sir Ronald Harwood, who idolised him and adapted a film version of his play The Browning Version, says, however, that he was not a hugely charismatic figure.

He met him only once and they had a very long chat. “I longed to talk about the theatre and his approach to play-writing, but all he wanted to talk about was cricket, comparing Dennis Amiss of Warwickshire to Wally Hammond for almost two hours,” says Harwood.

“I love cricket with a passion but two hours of Wally Hammond, whom I had never seen, was a bit much, even for me.”